I don't want to rain on your parade but some some things truly are easier heard than measured. I have a PhD in physics but don't have a lot of test equipment laying around unless I bring an Oscope from work and years ago when I made these observations I was not a scientist then. I had a Thorens TD290 turntable (until the circuit board failed) and I replaced the chrome (?) plated RCA plugs with thick, majestic looking gold plated OFHC ones from Esoteric Audio USA in the 1990s when they were making very good speaker wire and interconnects - I have dozens of their wire products still. (OFHC oxygen free high conductivity or electrolytic grade copper with nitrogen cell foam - oxygen is "corrosive"). Immediately the treble was brighter! The phonograph cartridge was the Stanton 681 EEE Calibration Standard. I still have it in a box with two other styli. It was indeed an AUDIBLE difference! Why? Gold is a much better electrical conductor than chromium (and aluminum) even though it is poorer than copper and especially silver. I used silver solder to make the connections, cutting off the old plugs, stripping the wires, and soldering on the new plugs. I even wore rubber gloves when I did that to avoid contamination by skin oils! (It is a relief to me that new turntables are not hard wired. They simply have RCA jacks now and I can use the cables I still have.) I also have a Marantz 6200 turntable that I will soon do some work on - I got a capacitor kit specifically for the 6200 from a company on eBay, and also got from a specialty audio company in Florida silver plated phonograph cables to replace, noch einmal (German: once again) those darned chrome plated RCA plugs. I have had the Marantz since before the Thorens and have history with it too. The headshell that came with it is 13.5 grams and I noticed the Shure M95ED nude diamond needle was getting narrower. I bought a new stylus but decided I needed to do more than that as the chrome plated S shaped arm was too massive. I bought two 6 gram Supex headshells from a local stereo store and decided I would not use the lead sheets enclosed with them. I removed the chrome plated brass counterweight and found a local gunsmith with a drill press. He drilled two holes in the back but I had to come back and have him drill two more. I mounted the Shure in the bare Supex shells, rebalanced the arm, set the tracking force, and shure enough (Ha ha!) Linda Ronstadt's "sinus condition" was GONE! It was an AUDIBLE improvement. I heard it - I did not imagine that I heard it. Why? Lower effective moving mass allowed the stylus to track the groove more precisely. Please note that I heard the new stylus before and after the drill press work so that was NOT the issue! (Currently I am using a U-turn Orbit Custom with a Grado Prestige Series Black 3, Soundcraftsmen stereo separates: A100 amplifier with MOSFET power transistors and toroidal transformer, P100 preamp, T100 AM/FM tuner, Klipsch KSF 8.5 tower speakers, Herbies Way Excellent II turntable mat, and the 8MZ stylus replacement whenever I want to use it. My ears are imperfect now but the sound from all this USA made equipment is fantastic. Singly they may be imperfect - except for my old but mint condition Soundcraftsmen gear! - but together it is a perfect synergy. "Time" from "The Dark Side of the Moon" is out of this world.) Now is there fraud? Yes and much of it is at the "mid fi" level. I need to motivate myself to write a letter of complaint to the FTC. Japanese makers of Audio video receivers (made in Malaysia) will say things like "60 watts per channel with all [5] speakers driven" AND power consumption is like only 200 watts. Obviously that is a massive violation of the principle of conservation of energy. You simply cannot get out more (300 watts) than the 200 you put in! Probably they mean "peak power" not average power but it is still FRAUDULENT! I will say one more thing - those speakers you see on the covers of "The Absolute Sound" and "Stereophile" are frequently like works of art and people with $$$ will want them. What kind of car do you drive? If you had all the $$$ you wanted you might want to buy a Corvette, a Viper, a Ferrari, or a Lamborghini. Now they are all cars and will take you from point A to point B - right? The same is probably true of those power amps and speakers that cost as much as a Corvette. Now if I had all the $$$ I wanted I would still buy an American car, a Tuatara! I'm just saying that there is a class of people who want to enjoy "the finer things in life". Now I am not a member of that club but at the same time I do NOT resent them. One last thing (really!) all this writing has brought to mind: R. D. Laing in "The Pollitics of Experience" said something like "your experience of you experiencing me is not the same as my experience of me experiencing you. We demand to experience the evidence but experience is the only evidence." That last sentence is very important, even here.
